Military helicopters were coming in from the north to pick up the citizens and carry them to dry land farther southeast. Sam counted about seven choppers, landing sporadically to pick people up from their temporary holds. One, a CH-47F Chinook, was stationary a few blocks away while the pilot was rounding up a few people for airlift.
Nina had almost reached the edge of town, her face pallid and wet from exhaustion and injury. Sam waded through the difficult waters to get to her before the monks on her trail could. She had slowed down considerably as her arm started to fail her. With all his strength, Sam used his arms to move faster and braved potholes, sharp objects and other obstacles under the water he could not see.
“Nina!” he shouted.
“Help me, Sam! I dislocated my shoulder!” she moaned. “I have nothing left in me. Pl-please, just he—,” she stammered. When she got to Sam he swept her up in his arms and doubled back, slipping into the cluster of buildings to the south of the Town Hall to find a place to hide. Behind them, the monks were shouting for people to help them seize the thieves.
“Oh shit, we are in seriously deep shit now,” he wheezed. “Can you still run, Nina?”
Her dark eyes fluttered and she groaned, holding her arm. “If you could put this back in the socket, I could make a genuine effort.”
From all his years in the field, filming and reporting on war zones, Sam had picked up valuable skills from EMTs he had worked with. “I’m not going to lie, love,” he warned. “This is going to hurt like fuck.”
With willing citizens striding through the narrow alleyways to find Nina and Sam, they had to be quiet while performing the replacement of Nina’s shoulder. Sam gave her his satchel, so that she could bite down on the strap, and, while their pursuers shouted below them in the water, Sam stepped against her rib cage with one foot, holding her trembling arm with both hands.
“Ready?” he whispered, but Nina only pinched her eyes shut and nodded. Sam pulled hard at her arm, inching it away from her body. Nina screeched in agony under the canvas bit, tears rolling from between her eyelids.
“I hear them!” someone exclaimed in their native tongue. Sam and Nina need not know the language to understand the statement and he carefully rotated her arm until it felt aligned with the rotator cuff before relenting. Nina’s muffled scream was not loud enough to be heard by the monks seeking them out, but there were already two men coming up the staircase protruding from the water’s surface to discover them.
One was armed with a short spear and he came straight for Nina’s weak body, lunging at her chest with the weapon, but Sam intercepted the stick. He punched him full in the face, rendering him temporarily unconscious while the other assailant sprang from the windowsill. With the spear Sam swung like a baseball hero, smashing the man’s cheek bone on impact. The one he had punched, came to. He grabbed the spear from Sam and stabbed him in the side.
“Sam!” Nina wailed. “Heads up!” She tried to get up, but she was too weak, so she flung his Beretta at him. The journalist caught the firearm and with one movement thrust the attacker’s head under water, planting a bullet in the back of his neck.
“They will have heard the shot,” he told her, pushing down on his stab wound. A row ensued outside in the flooded streets amidst the military helicopters’ deafening flight. Sam peered down from the elevated hiding place and saw the chopper still standing.
“Nina, can you walk?” he asked again.
Laboriously she sat up. “I can walk. What’s the plan?”
“By your infamy I take it you managed to get King Solomon’s diamonds?”
“Aye, in the skull in my backpack,” she answered.
Sam didn’t have time to ask about the skull reference, but he was relieved that she’d obtained the prize. They moved to the adjacent building and waited for the pilot to return to the Chinook before quietly staggering towards it while the rescued people were being seated. In their trail, no less than fifteen monks from the island and six men from Wetera were in pursuit through the marring waters. As the co-pilot prepared to close the door, Sam shoved the barrel of his gun against his temple.
“I really don’t want to do this, my friend, but we have to go north and we have to do it now!” Sam grunted, holding Nina’s hand and keeping her behind him.
“No! You can’t do this!” the co-pilot protested harshly. The shouts of the furious monks drew nearer. “You stay behind!”
Sam could not allow anything from keeping them off the helicopter and he had to prove he was serious. Nina looked back at the angry mob, hurling stones at them as they came closer. A rock struck Nina on the temple, but she did not fall.
“Jesus!” she screamed, finding blood on her fingers where she touched her head. “Stoning women every chance you get, you fucking primitive…”
A gunshot silenced her. Sam had shot the co-pilot in the leg, to the horror of the passengers. He aimed at the monks, stopping them in their tracks. Nina could not see the monk she’d saved among them, but while she sought his face, Sam grabbed her and pulled her into the helicopter full of terrified passengers. Next to her on the floor was the groaning co-pilot, and she removed her belt to tie down his leg. In the cockpit, Sam was shouting orders at the pilot at gunpoint, commanding the man to head north to Dansha, to the rendezvous point.
32
Flight from Aksum
Around the base of Mount Yeha several locals had gathered, horrified by the sight of the dead Egyptian guide they all knew from the dig sites. Another astonishing shock to them was the colossal rock fall that had closed up the bowels of the mountain. Unsure of what to do, the group of diggers, archaeological assistants, and vengeful locals examined the unexpected event, muttering amongst them to try and figure out what exactly had happened.
“There are deep tire tracks here, so there was a heavy truck here,” one laborer surmised, pointing to the impressions in the ground. “There were two, maybe three vehicles here.”
“Could just be the Land Rover that Dr. Hessian uses every few days,” another guessed.
“No, there it is, over there, just where he left it before he went to get more tools in Mek’ele yesterday,” the first laborer argued, pointing to the guest archaeologist’s Land Rover parked under a canvas tent roof a few meters away.
“Then how do we know if the box was returned? This is Adjo Kira. Dead. Purdue killed him and took the box!” one man shouted. “That is why they destroyed the chamber!”
His aggressive deduction effectively started a furor among the local residents in the neighboring villages and the tents near the dig site. Some of the men tried to reason, but the majority wanted nothing more than pure vengeance.
“Do you hear that?” Purdue asked Patrick, where they emerged from under the east face of the mountain. “They want to skin us alive, old boy. Can you run on that leg?”
“Fuck no,” Patrick winced. “My ankle is broken. Look.”
The cave-in brought on by Adjo had not killed the two men because Purdue had remembered an important feature of all of Adjo’s constructions — the postbox exit concealed under a false wall face. Thankfully, the Egyptian had taught Purdue about the old ways used to create traps in Egypt, notably inside old tombs and pyramids. It was how Purdue, Adjo, and Adjo’s brother, Donkor, had escaped with the Holy Box in the first place.
Covered in scratches, gouges, and dust, Purdue and Patrick crawled out behind some of the larger boulders at the foot of the mountain, Careful not to be detected. Patrick cringed as the stabbing pain in his right ankle shot through him with every dragging motion forward.